Some scientific procedures utilize a cloud of atoms collected by an atom trap. A typical atom trap uses magnetic and/or optical fields and operates in one, two, or three dimensions. Some traps are conservative while others include dissipation. Conservative traps constrain the atoms to a particular volume without changing the sum of their kinetic and potential energy. Dissipative traps reduce the atoms' kinetic energy and may or may not constrain their position. Loading an atom trap from a thermal source of atoms can be inefficient, so a two-dimensional trap is often used to collect atoms into a beam, which is used to load one or more three-dimensional traps. Magneto-optical traps typically utilize electromagnets to produce the two and three-dimensional trapping fields due to the ease of shaping the field strength. Electromagnets are convenient for producing strong and configurable fields for this purpose. However, they require electrical power and typically require convective or conductive cooling, and thermal insulation, all of which can take up a great deal of space. Outgassing and thermal considerations favor housing electromagnets outside the vacuum chamber containing the trap, which is detrimental for applications in which it is critical to have a small device, since it tends to increase the distance from the electromagnets to the atom cloud and increase the overall size of the device. Magneto-optical traps that utilized permanent magnets in the past generated an approximation of the desired magnetic field with a pair of magnetic discs whose parallel faces contained a hole coincident with the geometric center of the discs. Additional corrective magnets have also been used to compensate field limitations. This is an inefficient arrangement as the field has nonlinearities that reduce the size of the trapping volume, and thus the loading rate, for a given magnet size and spacing. Other systems used flexible magnets rolled into a tube. The tube arrangement provides limited access to the trapping volume.